“I was a good liberal in some sense at that point. I wanted to end a war. I wanted to support the civil rights movement.”

If the logic of capitalism is “expand or die,” then either it has to die or the world has to die.

We should open our eyes, see what’s in front of us, and act.

I don’t know that I ever bought into the “American dream.” I was a child of privilege. I grew up in the ’50s and it was a quiet time in America, at least on the surface and I grew up in a kind of feathery bed of privilege.

Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.

Certainly my parents were Dr. [Benjamin] Spock-driven parents. So they were tolerant.

I don’t buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I’m an intergenerational person.

It was one of the founders of SDS and that chief writer of the Port Huron Statement, which is still worth reading. It’s kind of the Bernie Sanders campaign document in a funny way.

I dropped out in ’64. And I came back to Michigan, in ’65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.

One question is: Who is the working class today, and how has it changed? Where are we in that? I don’t have a knee-jerk kind of 1930s thing about we must build the unions and that’s the way to the future.

After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, “You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago.” That was the limit of my imagination.

I get up every morning and think, today I’m going to make a difference. Today I’m going to end capitalism. Today I’m going to make a revolution. I go to bed every night disappointed but I’m back to work tomorrow, and that’s the only way you can do it.

Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year – a small government proposal if ever there was one.

It was Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Wendell Phillips – these were the people who made abolition real. Now, none of you guys is in favor of slavery, right?

One of the things that happened that I think is noteworthy, my parents were pretty tolerant people given their position in society.

I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.

The world spends two trillion dollars a year on military, and of that two trillion the United States spends one trillion. We have a bigger military than the rest of the world put together. We have 150 foreign military bases.